Grrl Power #1473 – Feed the meter
In a comic book, this is one of those pages you register, but basically flip right past. It’s transition, but I didn’t have time to make the previous page and this one a double, so here we are.
You know, Maxima could claim that she can fly at 1,250 light years a second. (I think I said the UCBA was around 5,000 light years from Earth, but I can’t find the comic where I put a number to it.) It wouldn’t be… wrong. Depending on how you actually measure her path. From point A to point B is indeed 5,000 light years and she traveled that distance in 4 seconds. But she didn’t, because the Aetherium Causeway does bridge 4,999.9999999999999999999999999999 of those light years. It’s one of those fun statistics lies. You know, a pregnant woman has a 50% chance of having a boy. She gets pregnant again and has a 50% chance of having a boy, but also a 25% chance of having a second boy. It’s all in the wording. Max wouldn’t be lying if she said she flew 5,000 light years in 4 seconds. If someone wants to use that information to extrapolate her top speed, that’s on them.
Now, the fact that Maxima is wearing a hologram of herself over her bespoke space-latex holo-emitter-embedded catsuit does mean that Cora and crew have a very detailed scan of Maxima in order to project the Max-o-gram. During this scan, Max insisted the holo.hpg image be destroyed after the tournament, not wanting to tempt Cora to disguise herself as Max and, you know, rob a bank or intimidate a corrupt politician or anything of the sort. Of course Cora laughed it off, saying she’d never even consider such a thing. Then Max said, “And naturally you wouldn’t be tempted to cosplay as me during a MMFMM fivesome.”
And there was the tiniest delay before Cora waved her hand and said, “That… of course… never even crossed my mind.”
I’m not sure if Max can narrow her eyes and raise one eyebrow at the same time, that seems like the sort of thing you have to practice a bit so you don’t look like you’re at the start of some kind of weird facial tic, so instead Max just stared until Cora’s hard light elbows started sweating.
Granted, it wasn’t a nude scan, since there’s no chance Max would need a hologram of that. But it’s not like no one has ever holoshopped an .hpg file.
Now assuming access to holodecks is as common as smartphones and also aren’t regulated by a buttoned-up Starfleet, let’s discuss the ethics of holo-disguising yourself as your friends and acquaintances and then having sex with other friends and acquaintances. Obviously if the other party doesn’t know you’re disguised, that’s bad. If the person you’re disguising yourself as doesn’t know and hasn’t given consent, that’s also bad. Maybe a little less bad than the first example, but it’s sort of a lateral difference. But if you’re at an orgy and the holodeck changes everyone’s appearance at random and everyone knows what’s up and consent is in abundance, then… well, congratulations, you probably have a bunch of fairly attractive friends. Huh. I guess that was a pretty straightforward ethics discussion. But then, and ethics conundrum that starts with “everyone is on-board and is okay with it” isn’t the sort of hypothetical that keeps philosophers arguing into the wee hours at their salons.
But that does lead me to the most unrealistic episode across all of Star Trek. The TNG episode where Westley finds out the girl he’s dating is a shapeshifter, and he’s all “Ew, no.” Now, Star Trek isn’t hard Sci-Fi. It’s kind of a medium-soft sci-fi, and in its defense, anything set more than a few hundred years in the future kind of can’t be super hard sci-fi, because we just don’t know where the possibilities of science and technology can really take us. If anything, something set 1,000 years in the future with technology that more or less resembles what we have today is probably less realistic.
But a teenage boy finding out that his girlfriend is a shapeshifter and getting squicked out by it is FUCKING FANTASY. It’d be more like, “Can you turn into Starfire from Teen Titans? Can you turn into Ariel in both her mermaid and landmaid forms? Can you turn into Counselor Troi? Can you turn into…” etc.
Of course, those floodgates probably only opens up after the shapeshifter gets past the conversation that goes, “I appreciate the “you’re all I want,” sentiment, but honestly, it’s okay to ask me to turn into other girls from our class. Or the volleyball coach. Or that one singer we both like.”
“Really?”
“Sure. In fact, as a shapeshifter, it would actually be racist of you to not ask me to turn into other girls while we make out.”
Final version is up, both at TWC and Patreon.
Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude!
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Time to speedrun Justice
I’m just a liiiiiiiiiittle bit confused as to why Max left and what’s going on.
by context, super hero needs
She has to stop Sydney’s Hammer from being crafted.
Perhaps:
Thom knows Ixah=Max
Last round, he was going to bet on her but stopped when she left the field. If he’d bet when her odds crashed from the departure, he’d have profited mightily when she returned.
Now he has another chance.
If he didn’t set this up, he may be repeating his same error – but he’d arranged a threat big enough to require her attention, he might be able to manipulate the market.
If it’s unethical to holo-disguise into someone else to have sex without that someone else’s consent, it’s equally unethical for shapeshifters to do the same thing with “other girls in our class, the volleyball coach,” etc.
She needs to be seen on Earth so that she throws off people who think they know she’s not on Earth.
Why the quarry? Good question! All good scifi happens in quarries, perhaps.
It was because that was the last place Sydney opened it on Dirt, and it would take way too long to set a new location (as explained by Sydney in panel onecontinuoussentence :) )
That was surely covered in the planning for this contingency, but it would be just like Sydney to explainitinonelongrunonword again.
Also all good Dr. Who episodes I mean scifi happens in quarries. :D
Or the Vasquez Rocks.
That’s a wee bit of an over-simplification of things with regards to the shapeshifting partner. Westley for example is apparently a heterosexual male and we can’t really be sure the shapeshifting alien qualified as female, so being squicked out over their shapeshifting nature isn’t that unrealistic. When Exiles Morph finds out the one female companion is homosexual he offers to be female for her but it’s no-go because he wouldn’t be female (at least not as she defined it). While some wouldn’t care some would.
When it comes to shapeshifting aliens, do they even have the concept of ‘male and female’ at all?
Most of them presumably have the *concept*, because they deal with other species that have it, but they may or may not care about it.
Just because they shapeshift doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have sexes or understand the concept of male and female. Skrulls are shapeshifters but they’re also definitely in two sexes of male and female they’re just generally shown unconcerned about what sex (or gender if you prefer) they appear as. Skippy the Skrull from the Hercules mini-series decades ago for example was an elderly skrull who preferred running around and making money off of a humanoid female facade he created. Which of course got him outed because anyone that knows Hercules knows he’s an annoying stalker of attractive women and Skippy ended up having to reveal the truth to put a stop to it.
They might (or might not) have biological sexes, but would they have the cultural concept of “gender”?
There’s a tradition in Harry Potter fanfic that the metamorphagus Nymphadora Tonks hates being asked to pretend to be other people for sex, and only respects people who like her as she is. There’s another tradition that says she enjoys recreational shape changes but hates anyone that asks for her natural form because her natural form is a younger version of Bellatrix Lestrange. There is pretty much no evidence for either theory, given that the books are for kids, so my theory that I have that is my own is that fanfic writers spend way too much time thinking about this stuff…
That’s… what fanfics, and the writers behind them, are all about, have you seen how many LOTR fanfics there were of Gimli and Legolas being a romantic couple?
You do know that “50 Shades of Shit” started as a fanfic, right? Believe it was either a fanfic of Hairy Pothead or Twihard
And believe you meant something other than ‘tradition’
To be fair, Gimli & Legolas is an easy ship compared to a lot of others you might see. They were close enough friends for Legolas to ask and Gimli to accept taking the voyage to Valinor. He was literally the ONLY dwarf to ever see the Undying Lands, and it was all due to his bond with Legolas.
Also, from what I remember hearing about it, “50+ Ways BDSM Shouldn’t Be Done” was definitely started as Twilight fanfic. Not entirely surprising, since Twilight itself (based on what the author has actually said in interviews) started as basically a horny dream journal.
> You do know that “50 Shades of Shit” started as a fanfic, right? Believe it was either a fanfic of Hairy Pothead or Twihard
It was a fanfic of Twilight, and it was published serially by “Snowqueens Icedragon”, aka E.L.James. Note the absence of possessive apostrophe, which is weird but in character for James’ writing ability.
Uh oh. Those look like Keepers. Is Sydney going to have to fight Saren?
Reeeeeeeeeeeee! Bayesian Logic failure detected!
To be honest, I know what you meant, but he statement remains incorrect. She does not “also” have a 25% chance of having a second boy. She has a 50% chance of having a second boy, period. She *had* a 25% chance of having *two boys in row*, but the prior (the first boy) is locked in now.
Thinking like this is why the Monte Hall Problem freaks people out.
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) said, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
If you have two hungry people, and you give one a chicken, on average, both are fed.
“In fact, as a shapeshifter, it would actually be racist of you to not ask me to turn into other girls while we make out.”
I feel like this would be individualized based on their personal experiences rather then a universal commonality. For example i’ve known many girls who get offended if you stare at their breasts while talking to them, but ive also known some girls with BA’s (myself included) that are annoyed if their breasts arent obviously stared at during conversation. More then once I’ve wanted wear a top in public that says “Excuse me, my breasts are down here.”
Hmmmm, seems you CAN actually order that on Amazon (although ‘boobs’ not ‘breasts’). So you wouldn’t be alone in wearing one if you did that. Honestly surprised I haven’t seen that at a convention considering how many of the women seem to be dressing to emphasize their bustlines.
Note the GailClock in the corner. We’ll be seeing that count down.
Interesting how Max’s chest goes ahead of her instead of being pulled back by her speed. Superhero physics be weird, yo.
Either her defense or flight power counteracts the effects of gravity, as shown here, but page #350 implies that her flight doesn’t include localized gravity… I’m guessing the defense counteracts drag, regardless.
It’s a hologram anyway, so we can put that down to carelessness on the part of the designer.
Nobody ever fills in old quarries unless they just naturally fill with water. I and a friend (very stupidly) free climbed down the high face of a WWII era quarry in an old field that had been nearly forgotten until we came on it while walking over a neighbor’s farm. Teens are dumb.
Want a picture of what old surface mines look like after about 50 to 100 years, give or take? Try this:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2920134,-87.0190268,12642m/data=!3m1!1e3
Notice all the strange elongated lakes and odd ridges in the ground? That’s what happens with unreclaimed mines, and those were mostly pre 1970. And the 1970 mine reclamation law was aimed at coal, not rocks.
I’m wondering about the portal Syd made. I don’t recall seeing that exact effect before.
That’s how it looked the last time she used it.